Friday, March 30, 2007

Just busy redrafting, really, a chore only broken up by the odd walk to the shops for those vital aids to creativity - teabags and biscuits. For fun, and let me tell you it is enormous fun, I've been mucking about with twitter, although that big chunky twitter badge in the sidebar will have to go as, at some points during the day, I've heard it just appears as a big slab of nothingness and slows everything down (if you're reading the archives and it's now 2009 you'll have nothing to refer to at this point. Why didn't you join me the first time round?). The point of twitter eluded me when I signed up a few months ago but I think I've cracked it now and had a revelatory, Eureka moment of "aah!" last night when it all made sense, although 8 hours later and I've forgotten what it was. Anyway, the experience can be much improved by you signing up and befriending me so you can twitter me your every movement on what is, essentially, a microblog and 21st century paging service. Do it! As a result of twitter I've acquired a new virtual friend, New England teacher and writer Jean Shankle, who instantly knows how to grab the attention of a very vain man: write an entry about his blog! M also got a mention on Jean's website.

Ah, the Daily Mail. A headline today caught my eye - 25 years on and the BBC still won't celebrate Mrs Thatcher's role in the Falklands war. Celebrate? Thatcher? War? What a funny little paper the Daily Mail is. I shouldn't have read further but it waffles on: there will be little celebration of the Prime Minister who refused to let the Argentines prevail. Ah yes, refused to let them prevail by sinking a retreating ship and its crew. Let's bake a cake, hoist the flags and dance around the room to Earth, Wind & Fire with the Thatch, shall we? Oddly, despite the headline and the typically Mailtastic first par, the crux of the article, by Geoffrey Wansall, is actually about playwright Ian Curteis's efforts to persuade the BBC to air his three hour (!) television drama The Falklands Play on BBC1 in June. It was commissioned just after the ceasefire and was intended for broadcast on the fifth anniversary of the Argentine invasion. But the pro-Thatcher narrative (it shows her as a human! She cries! What was Cureis thinking???) and dramaturgical suggestions that offended the writer secured its place on the shelf. A shorter version eventually appeared in 2002 and also turned up on a DVD this year. The last couple of pars jolt us back to Mail territory and also suggests they can't do the math: Clearly, the BBC sees nothing wrong in brutally condemning a play for a decade or more, only to make a commercial profit from it years later. Read the full article here.

That headline, though, was nothing compared to one in the New York Times: An Actress Who Wears Her Uterus On Her Sleeve. How can you not read on after that? The feature that follows is about comedian Jackie Hoffman who, apparently, mines her hysterectomy for comic material and the uterus in question is, erm, one she's knitted.